The Big Boy and the Tomcat--A cautionary Tale.
Big Titles: Why am I so picky about a thing like this? The bottom line is that humans are more important than machines. A little thing like this can shift the focus where it should not be.
Fans love giving big titles to retired machines. King of the rail, King of the flight deck, King of the sea and so forth.
Meet the Alco 4-8-8-4 4000 series ‘Big Boy’. That wasn’t her nickname at first. She was going to be called the Wasatch type until someone chalked the name Big Boy on the smokebox of one of the engines. The unfortunate name stuck like flies to flypaper. When the engine was retired, Union Pacific allowed a filmmaker to make a film called Last of the Giant with their name on it that put all its focus on the engine give her big blown up titles like King of the rail and using pronouns such as ‘him’. It took the focus off the people behind the machine. Now the locomotive has taken fictional proportions in the eyes of many of her fans. We are hard pressed to find any material on the engineers, firemen and other employees that made this engine happen. All we have left is the engine herself. Very little memory is left of the men that made the Alco 4000 series possible. I am hard pressed to find a piece on the labor of love that made this monster run. The 4000 has a host of fans that post like 9 year olds. The post like the engine is Thomas. I even had one get up my nose because I refused such childish nonsense.
Let’s take another Locomotive, the GS-4 Daylight. Her name wasn’t blown out of proportion despite her remarkable beauty. We have the history of the human element behind this train preserved for our enjoyment.
How does that relate to the F-14? She was retired in 2006. Iran is the only country that flies her now. There are already fans trying to give her big titles and personifying her in ways the crews and maintainers never saw her. She’s that passive aggressive machine that needed many maintenance hours to get off the flight deck. The the focus is already shifting from the heroes the flew and maintained her to just the airplane. Many fans are forgetting or refusing to recognize the human labor of love that went into these machines.
No machine should ever wear the designation of, Sir or Brother. They are not officers, they hold no rank, not did they bleed on an aircraft to get her flying. Those sacred titles belong to military personnel. King should be a honorary designator given to a human, not a machine.
Big titles given to machines minimizes the people that put all the hard work into them.
We should be honoring the men and women that put the Tomcat in the air. People are priceless. The sad truth is that machines are expendable. Their job is to serve people.
Let’s not let ‘Big Boy’ happen to the Tomcat. Let’s preserve her history as it is. Let’s keep the squadron stories alive. Books like Bye, Bye, Baby do an excellent job of that.
